Habits, habits, habits. It’s seems like that’s all I talk about. 🙂 While this may be the case, the reality is habits either drive success or failure. If you’re holding on to bad habits, they can destroy any chance you have of accomplishing your goals.
As I’ve talked about before, a habit has three distinct parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward. Here’s a quick definition of each one.
Cue: Some type of stimuli that provides a signal to your brain that it is time to perform the given habit
Routine: The act of completing the habit
Reward: The feeling you receive for doing the habit
This creates a cycle that can be hard to break if you’ve practiced the habit over and over again. It becomes engrained within your body and mind. It becomes apart of your daily life and schedule.
But, while it may be hard to break it’s not impossible. It comes down to choosing the right strategy. Today, I want to provide you with an unbelievably easy strategy to break any habit.
What is this strategy, you may be asking. It’s simple.
Prepare ahead of time by creating a buffer between your habit cue and habit routine
Let me explain.
We’ve all heard the saying, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. This phrase talks about the value of planning or preparing beforehand. It’s often used among sports teams.
For example, if a football team is facing an opponent they’ve never played before, they need to know everything they can about them. So, what do they do? They watch film from their games, they learn about all the players, and they may even ask other coaches for advice.
They do this so that they’ll feel comfortable facing this opponent when game day arrives and have a solid game plan for beating them. By creating a plan, their odds of winning improve.
The same applies in everyday life. If you are struggling with a bad habit, you need to create a plan of attack. If you do so, the odds of breaking the habit are in your favor.
So, what exactly do I mean by prepare ahead of time by creating a buffer between your habit cue and habit routine? Well, let me give you a example that a lot of people struggle with.
Let’s say one of the habits you want to break is eating dessert every night. Your typical day looks like this:
You get home from work around 7pm, eat dinner around 7:30pm, then head straight to the fridge afterword for the ice cream container. This happens each night like clockwork.
One cue that may be driving this habit is finishing dinner. Once you have cleaned your plate, you feel a need to sweeten your palate.
Since you only feel this craving once dinner is finished, we need a buffer after dinner (your habit cue) and before dessert (your habit routine) to break this habit. One buffer strategy you can use is to brush your teeth after dinner.
To prepare ahead of time, you tell yourself that after dinner you will head straight to the bathroom and brush your teeth. Once your teeth have been cleaned, that craving will most likely have died down.
And since you’ve already brushed your teeth, you won’t want to eat anything else or you’ll need to brush them a second time. And no one wants to do that.
While this is a common example, the strategy applies to any habit you would like to break. You need to prepare ahead of time and create a buffer between the cue and the routine of your habit.
Tell yourself that when X (craving/cue of habit) happens you will do Y (buffer between cue and routine). Practice this over and over until it becomes second nature. That buffer is the key to breaking a routine and ultimately breaking any habit if practiced consistently.
Photo Credit:
1. lifepalette.com
